The season’s top style and design titles to add to your bookshelf | Canada Voices

Casa Kahlo: Frida Kahlo’s Home and Sanctuary by Mara Romeo Kahlo, Mara de Anda Romeo, Frida Hentschel Romeo (Rizzoli Electa)

Frida Kahlo is omnipresent – this year alone she’s the subject of an opera and three museum retrospectives, including the sweeping Museum of Fine Arts, Houston survey, Frida: The Making of an Icon. The recent US$54.7-million Sotheby’s sale of The Dream (The Bed) also now makes her the most expensive female artist at auction, surpassing Georgia O’Keeffe.

Kahlo is so treasured that Mexican patrimony laws have designated her works in Mexico as “artistic monuments.” With such a modest output, it’s little wonder Kahlo’s life and possessions – her early drawings, jewellery, wardrobe and keepsakes – have become objects of fascination. In this volume, the artist’s great-nieces curate a tour of Kahlo’s private family home and personal sanctuary in Mexico City that relatives – including, for a time, the authors – have occupied since 1930.

Fashioning The Crown: A Story of Power, Conflict and Couture by Justine Picardie (Farber & Farber)

Following her books on Coco Chanel and Catherine Dior, Picardie, the former editor-in-chief of Harper’s Bazaar UK, excavates the image of the Crown. Through world wars, cultural upheaval and massive social change, the Windsor Crown has used fashion as a soft power. Think Princess Elizabeth’s interest in her military uniform before she became queen, or how she shaped her monarchical wardrobe with London couturiers such as Hardy Amies and Norman Hartnell; The Queen Mother signalling a common touch through simple clothing on walkabouts during the Depression; and the Duke of Windsor’s sartorial panache.

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The volume is a tour of couture diplomacy and key figures (yes, including Queen Elizabeth II’s beloved Hermès headscarves and Barbour Beaufort jacket). Its release also coincides with the centenary of the late Queen’s birthday.

Blush: Contemporary Makeup Artists by Phaidon Editors (Phaidon)

“I lived for makeup,” supermodel Linda Evangelista said of the medium that spurred her early love of fashion in the forward to this book. She shares childhood memories of watching her mother’s meticulous application of eye shadow transform her into a modern working woman.

Grounded in the industry’s early talents and pioneers of technique, this volume highlights 75 artists from 35 countries (including Montreal’s own Julie Cusson, longtime official makeup artist for Chanel in Canada). From established names such as Charlotte Tilbury, Sandhya Shekar and Pati Dubroff to emerging talents such as Raisa Flowers and Valentina Li, the extraordinary shoots and runway looks showcase the best of makeup artistry, fantasy and beauty.

Charlotte Perriand: The Art of Dwelling by Jacques Barsac, et al. (Hatje Cantz)

Perriand, the French architect and designer noted for tubular steel furniture, argued that metal furnishings were an industrial-era design necessity, much like concrete in architecture. The visionary 20th-century figure’s political activism and social responsibility included developing emergency housing and compact living units – a prescience that is uncannily relevant today.

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Perriand’s humanistic approach to living shines in this monograph, newly translated into English, that traces the evolution of her ideas over eight decades, from her early association with Le Corbusier and Pierre Jeanneret to her experiences as a consultant for several years in Japan, while learning about compact living and modularity.

The book features her manifestos on habitational logic and flexible space, along with previously unpublished material and research from her Paris archive. “It’s not about today that we need to be thinking; it’s about tomorrow,” Perriand said in 1999.

Gilded Age Fashion by Elizabeth L. Block (Hardie Grant)

Decades before the Met Gala claimed the first Monday in May, Caroline Astor ruled the third Monday in January with her annual ball – the most coveted invitation of the New York social season. The “Gilded Age” was originally a satirical moniker bestowed by Mark Twain, but historian Block (a senior editor in the publications department at the Metropolitan Museum of Art) gives the era’s oppressive decorum its weight.

With 50 examples from museum collections (several of which served as direct inspiration for designer Kasia Walicka-Maimone’s looks in The Gilded Age series), Block unpacks the dresses along with their social and cultural context – in particular the clash between old and new money in the late 19th century that gave clothing such high stakes. It’s the perfect primer ahead of season four.

Schiaparelli: Fashion Becomes Art by Sonnet Stanfill, Lydia Caston (V&A Publishing)

Elsa Schiaparelli had what Sonnet Stanfill, senior curator of fashion at London’s Victoria and Albert Museum, called “an artist’s response to dressing the body.” This lavish tome is the catalogue to the UK’s first-ever exhibition dedicated to interwar Europe’s most celebrated couturier, exploring the Italian designer’s enduring influence up to and beyond her 1954 retirement.

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The book pays close attention to Schiaparelli’s radical garment work, which broke new philosophical and technical ground through experiments with materials such as rhodophane, a fabric that resembled glass, and collaborations with the Fauves, Cubists, Futurists and Surrealists.

The porosity between fine art and commercial art is evident in the conceptual wit of her clothes, such as an evening coat devised with avant-garde artist Jean Cocteau that’s festooned in roses and features a double profile. If surreal fashion is experiencing a revival, it’s as Schiaparelli herself foretold: “In difficult times, fashion is always outrageous.”